I haven’t been Black since 1972… A Redux

By Patrick Hall

In the year 2022, America remains the least racist nation on earth, despite what former President Barack Obama seems to infer in his newest work of political solipsism, A Promised Land. But what is most tiresome, if not disheartening about the former President is, that he is the first American President in my short 72 years on this earth, who never appeared to like our country all that much. In retrospect, one of the biggest differences between Barrack Obama and former President Donald Trump remains.  Trump celebrated the country despite its flaws, while Obama couldn’t wait to point out to the world that America has always been lacking.

 However, too many of us who were onto the surreptitiousness’ of his character and Presidency, Obama like many of his compadres on the cultural left, have spent their entire political lives drinking far too deeply from the well, that defined America as systemically racist.

 But with that said, it is impossible to disprove a negative as naïve, if not completely amorphous and intellectually lazy as labeling a people, or a large segment of the American populace as racist.  Does racism still exist in all societies and cultures? You bet!  Human beings are inheritably flawed and sometimes struggle with this peculiar “original sin.” Yet, if the truth is told, the people who have done the least to help mitigate the sporadic racism, that still festered in our culture, have often been black people, the cultural left, Liberal Progressives along with the Democratic Party.

Unfortunately, Obama and many well-to-do African Americans (mostly Democrats) have too much time and energy on their hands to be constantly offended by God knows what. To them, if some jerk, speeds by in a car and blurts out the word “nigger”, this becomes an imprimatur, that we are still living in Jim Crow America. Every perceived racial slight has become a referendum on how racist, or for that matter, how sexist America still is. It is just more hidden goes the reasoning.   Leftist catechumenates, like Obama, steadfastly believe racism still thrives in the apocryphal realms of implicit race bias and micro racisms, being dutifully evangelized for decades in academia, the mainstream media, CRT propagandists, as well as by politicians, like Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.  

The secular hermeneutics or principles underpinning the cultural-political poison, that America is a racist society, were at the heart of President Biden’s comment, “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me, or Trump, then you ain’t black.”   Oh well!  I guess I haven’t been black since 1972. That year, I supported the Democratic nominee for President, George McGovern.  

However, at this point, racism has become a cultural elixir for many middle and upper-middle-class black Americans.  They simply can’t leave home without it.  Despite their success in a supposedly racist society, they seldom take the time or opportunity to “consistently” teach others within the black underclass to see the opportunities, that America affords all of its citizens.  It’s just way too cool, avant-garde, or a boost to their egos, to be seen as crusaders for racial justice when in reality the black underclass’ everyday problems have little to nothing to do with race or white folks being mean to them. Obama and many alleged, “real black people,” (again mostly Democrats) will never acknowledge intergroup differences in interests, abilities, cultural values or mores, and family structure (or lack thereof) in many black households, which might produce decades of socio-economic disparities.

What is so painful about the charge of America being racist is that it doesn’t recognize the reality of genuine racial and cultural oppression in this world. If you want to see real racism and cultural genocide, observe the way modern-day Christians are killed in many countries throughout the Middle East. Try being an Assyrian Chaldean Catholic Christian living in places like Lebanon, or Coptic Christians in Egypt, getting their heads severed because of who they are.  Do you want to experience the full measure, of honest-to-God institutional government-supported segregation?  Survey the way the Chinese Communist Party and their political class have treated Mongolians and Tibetans.  Someday sit down with an Assyrian Chaldean Christian, and have them expound upon the murderous horrors, that they and their families lived through in their home country. Thirty years ago, while living in Turlock, California, my family befriended several Assyrian Catholic Christians, with whom we shared a Church building.  They experienced true hate, unabashed racism, and religious persecution.
 
I would ask those who like Obama still fret over remnants of racist individuals, that still exist here in America, to do some research about the concentration camps the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operates to “re-educate” hundreds of thousands of Muslim Uyghurs.  You can rest assured that any Muslim Uyghur would trade places in a micro-second with those Americans, who think we still live in an intractably racist and “bad country”.   We are simply, not a racist nation!

[Patrick is a retired University Library Director. He is graduate of Canisius College and the University of Washington where he earned Masters Degrees in Religious Studies Education, Urban Anthropology and Library and Information Science.  Mr. Hall has also completed additional course work at the University of Buffalo, Seattle University and St. John Fishers College of Rochester New York. He has published in several national publications such as Commonweal, America, Conservative Review, Headway, National Catholic Reporter, Freedom's Journal Magazine and American Libraries. He has published in the peer reviewed publications, Journal of Academic Librarianship and the Internet Reference Services Quarterly. From 1997 until his retirement in January 2014 he served on the Advisory Board of Urban Library Journal, a CUNY Publication.]